But [the young man in the white robe said to the women], "Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you." Mark 16:6-7

It is good to see you all here today. You all got the invitation, and you have arrived in time for the celebration; we were counting on you – it wouldn’t be a party without you!

“What invitation?” you may be saying; “No one invited me to come to this service this morning, it’s just what I do every year at Easter;”  OR “It was a beautiful spring morning and I just felt like getting out of the house, and decided that it might be interesting to go to church this morning;” OR “Well, a friend did invite me and suggested that I might want to check out that pretty stone church at the top of the hill, but I’m not really sure why I am here;” OR “The worship in this community of faith is the center and the touchstone of my life, and I am here whenever I am able to be.”

You may find yourself identifying with one or more of those statements – or with none of them - but the truth is, God invited you here –
each and every one of you – to come and celebrate the most important event and spiritual reality in Christian faith. Whatever moved you or motivated you to come today was God’s way of inviting you to come to the party that celebrates the victory of life over death –
the resurrection of Jesus from death to new life.

Do any of you like surprise parties? They’re always a bit tricky, aren’t they? You never know if you are going to pull it off: getting all the guests to arrive early and hide in a back room or a closet, keeping the party a surprise from the guest of honor, sometimes tying yourself up in knots trying to create a reason for the person to be out of the house while the party is being set up or stopping by
a venue they don’t usually go to.

Sometimes surprise parties work well, and are lots of fun, but sometimes they don’t work so well. My siblings and I gave my parents a surprise party for their fortieth wedding anniversary; they were truly surprised, but my mother was so taken aback she couldn’t get her breath for a minute or two, and we were afraid that our happy surprise might turn into a trip to the emergency room!

And then there are people who hate surprises; they want to be able to plan and prepare for as much of life as possible; or maybe large groups of people are hard for them to deal with and surprise parties are just not their idea of fun.

Surprises can be tricky, precisely because they come out of the blue, and they catch you unaware, and unready. That’s what happened to the women who went early Sunday morning to the tomb with spices to anoint Jesus’ body for burial – they were surprised. They had been at the Crucifixion; they had seen with their own eyes the torture, suffering and death of their friend and rabbi
at the efficient hands of the Roman army.

They had helped place Jesus’ body in the tomb, the burial cave hastily offered by Jesus’ follower Joseph of Arimathea; they had watched as the soldiers rolled the stone across the entrance to the tomb, but then hurried on their way, anxious to get home before the sundown beginning of the Sabbath, on which day no work could be done – not even anointing the dead for burial.

All of these events were a surprise to the women, and to the rest of Jesus’ friends and disciples. The idea that their friend and teacher, the one they were sure was the Messiah, God’s representative on earth, the one on whom they had pinned all their hopes  and dreams was now dead was a shocking, horrible surprise.

How could it have all gone so wrong?  How could they have gotten it all so wrong? But life is sometimes like that, isn’t it? In fact, life is often like that; the hopes and dreams we have, the plans we make, the desires of our hearts can turn to dust – in an instant or over a life time, leaving us saying: “What happened?”

That’s where the women were – emotionally and spiritually – on that Sunday morning; feeling like their world had come to an end,
and the best they could do was finish what had been left over from Friday, so they went to the tomb to add the embalming spices to Jesus’ burial cloths.

Once they got there they were even more shocked and surprised: the stone sealing the entrance to the tomb had been moved,
and as they looked inside a figure appearing as a young man dressed in white (an angel perhaps) spoke to them, telling them not to be alarmed or astonished that Jesus was not there. He had been raised – “Go ahead, see for yourselves, the tomb is empty. But there is a message for you: Jesus will meet you in Galilee, just as he promised you; you will see him there. Take this message to the other disciples.”

This was a shock and a surprise, indeed  - and the women were frightened and fled from the tomb, and said nothing to anyone.They got so caught up in the surprise of the moment that the actual message was pushed aside – a confusing mix of fear, shock, self-doubt about what they had seen and heard and felt, like having the wind knocked out of them, the experience at the empty tomb took their breath away.

Well, that not the way we usually think of the end of the story; in the other three versions of the Gospel – in Matthew, Luke and John –  Jesus appears to the women; to the Twelve (his core leadership team); to other disciples, as well. But not here in Mark; the best scholarship says that the next bit of the account is missing, the end of the scroll in the most ancient manuscript having been worn away, broken off, and that later scribes tried to write two brief summations of their understanding of Jesus’ resurrection.

But we have the story as it stands, and the surprise and shock of it registers with us, still – if we listen with the ears of our hearts.

The tomb is empty, Jesus is not here, he is going ahead of you to Galilee and will see you there. Galilee was the place it all began for the disciples – it’s where they first met Jesus, where he gathered them together – calling them from their homes and their jobs to take on a new way of life, to consider a new possibility of God’s meaning and purpose; it’s where Jesus launched his public ministry
and mission, and now they were being sent back to where they had started, but with a difference.

Jesus was raised from the dead; the events of Good Friday, and everything that had led up to it, had been undone; the power of God’s life had trumped the power of death; from here on out everything would be different. Going back to Galilee was not starting over, not going back in defeat, but taking the message home and knowing that the Risen Christ would meet them there, that in the places they lived and worked Jesus and the power of resurrection would be there.

That is an astonishing thing – the power of death has been broken; God has entered human life in the person of Jesus and has taken on all of our human experience, including death and sin and failure, and left it in the grave.

God has raised Jesus to new life, the life that he was trying to explain to the disciples all along, the life that they and we caught glimpses of in his teaching and healing and deeds of power.  This new life – this resurrection life, this Easter life which began that early Sunday morning when Jesus rose – means that death is not the end; there is more to the story of human life and our lives than death and sadness and brokenness.

We have been made by God, part of his creation that he blessed and called good, made for the purpose and intent of life and relationship with God, here in this life and for all eternity. God’s loving purpose for us and for all creation is that we shall not be lost or destroyed, but that in God we shall find our deepest life, our greatest meaning, the fulfillment of our humanity and the blessing of God’s own divine life within us.  Jesus went to the Cross and the grave ahead of us, breaking the bonds of death, paving the way, opening the door into God’s new life for us.

There is much to be said about resurrection, the Risen Christ, the love of God that never fails for each one of us – but maybe it is best that Mark’s Gospel breaks off where it does; it gives us the opportunity for each one of us to tell the end of the story as we know and experience it, to write the account of Jesus’ resurrection in each one of our lives, to proclaim the Gospel according to you.

And isn’t that a surprise? That God would call you and me into partnership with him, into his inner circle to write the last chapter of the Gospel, of the Good News? But that is exactly what God does, because each one of us here this morning is loved and cherished by God and is invited by him to discover and learn God’s purposesand gifts in this new life for yourselves – for yourselves and for the sake of the world around you.

Jesus has shown the way; he is risen and bids you to meet him in the midst of your own life, in Galilee, to live the power and presence and life-giving love of God each and every day. That is a life and a love worth celebrating!  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Easter Day: The Sunday of the Resurrection
April 8, 2012

Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.                                                                                                                                               Romans 6:4
Happy Easter – and congratulations! We have all made the journey and the transition from Lent and Holy Week to Easter; gathered here together we have crossed that threshold from darkness to light, from suffering to joy, from death to life.

Easter has begun – and I’d like to ask you a question; do you have a passport?

I remember how exciting it was the first time I applied for a passport – to get my photo taken and then go to the county office to file my application. I was looking forward to my first overseas trip, and without a passport I wouldn’t be going anywhere.
Of course nowadays, when you need some form of government identification just to set foot on an airplane, a passport may not seem quite so exotic and adventurous, but still – if you want to cross the border, go to another country, have an international adventure, a passport is an absolute requirement. Without a valid passport you can’t enter the country of your destination.

So what does this have to do with Easter?  Well, it’s not about going to the Caribbean for spring break, but it does have everything to do with moving from sin to grace, from dark to light, from slavery to freedom, from death to life.

In his letter to the Christians in Rome, Paul says: “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? …For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.” 

The language that Paul uses is all about location and spiritual citizenship; about having lived prior to our faith in Christ in a spiritual kingdom where sin is a “dark ruling power” that claimed all our loyalty and shaped our reality; sin as a quality of life, rather than a description of our conduct, in the kingdom of sin and death.  And in Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection the frontier between that old kingdom of death and the new Kingdom of God’s grace has been opened, the portals swung wide into freedom and new life. Jesus has flung open the gates, and our passport to this new country is baptism; it is our passport, our visa and our naturalization papers – all in one go.

Baptism – being baptized into Christ – is what moves us from the kingdom of sin (separation from God) into the kingdom of God, and it’s possible because of Jesus’ death on the Cross and his rising to new life on the third day.

We’ve just renewed our baptismal vows in this service and been sprinkled with water from the font, and we’ve been bidden to “remember your baptism and be thankful.” That’s not a request to recall something that might have happened to us as infants or young children, but it is a call to consider who we are (Christians) and to whom we belong (Christ). Our baptism into Christ means that we have spiritually and symbolically shared in Jesus’ death; the water of baptism is more about drowning than is it is about bathing. It says that the power of sin in our lives has been destroyed, and we have now moved to a new place, emigrated to a new country with a different language, different customs, a different set of expectations about how to live and what is important.

This new realm in which we live is the Kingdom of God – it is a new address, a new citizenship for us that is marked by justice, grace, truth, compassion, humility, new life and the power of God that we see in resurrection. When we joined Jesus in his death, when we became entwined with Christ through baptism, we also were united with him in his resurrection, in his rising to new life – and Easter is the start of it all.

We have moved from that country called sin to that country called the Kingdom of God, through the portal of resurrection, by the passport of our baptism, and we stand on resurrection ground. We may only be a little way in, we may have only just stepped inside, and we all have a life-time journey to get to the center, a journey into Christ – but we have arrived in our new homeland, and we have left behind the old life and the old ways.

I have a clergy colleague who has lived with depression for years, with bi-polar disorder. He shared with me that one of the touchstones that helps him on days when he struggles is splashing water on his face in the morning and reminding himself that he is a baptized person; he belongs to Christ, not to himself; and the power of the resurrection is alive and active in his life because of his baptism. We all have things we struggle with; we all have trials and temptations that come at us like too many e-mails from our old life in our in-box; like postcards from the old country, reminding us of what life was like before we were joined to Christ. These can be distressing, they can weigh us down and catch us off-guard, knock us off-center when we least expect them. But the spiritual power of those trials and temptations, the forces which would draw us back into our old lives, has been broken be Jesus’ rising from death to new life.

So now in the Kingdom of God, standing on resurrection ground, we are learning a new language, new customs, new patterns of life, just as we would if we were to move to a different country, a different culture.

Our deepening life of faith and practice of holy habits is a reflection of our growing fluency with “speaking resurrection”, with living “in Christ” and we will go on growing and maturing, by the grace of God. But it all starts here, at Easter, with the central fact of Jesus’ death and resurrection that has flung wide the gates, that has opened up the frontier, that has trampled down death by his own death and resurrection.

And we have moved to our new homeland, our new reality by virtue of our baptism – our passport, our visa and our naturalization papers. Remember your baptism and be thankful – indeed!  Christ is risen! The Lord has risen indeed!  Alleluia!  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints' Church, Millington, NJ
The Great Vigil of Easter
April 7, 2012

Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end.  John 13:1

I love you. How often do we say that to our spouse, or our child, or a parent, a friend, a sibling, a beloved one? Or even a cat or dog or other pet? And when we say those words we know we mean them on several different levels, depending on who we are speaking to. Our love for our friend is not the same as love for a parent, or a husband or wife; but it is all love, just the same – it all springs from the same source: an affection, a regard for, a commitment to another who delights us and enlarges our world. These are all close, intimate relationships where there is give and take, and much is shared: sometimes the little details and trivia of daily life, and sometimes the grand visions and longings of our hearts.

For most of us, the circle of our loving relationships is pretty small; it’s hard to be “up close and personal” with a large group of people; after all, for all the “friends” you may have on Facebook, how many of them do you really follow on a consistent basis?  How many can you actually keep track of, all at one time?

There is a classic poster featuring the “Peanuts” comic strip character Lucy – you know, Linus’ bossy older sister? In the poster Lucy is saying “I love mankind – it’s people I can’t stand!” For the crabby, critical Lucy it is far easier to claim affection for a nameless, faceless humanity that she will never meet - let alone have to work with and get along with - than it is to love real, individual flesh-and-blood people – and I suspect that many of us would echo Lucy’s sentiments. Loving real people can be hard work, after all. And so our circle of love and affection is fairly small.

But what about Jesus? Who did he love? We know he had a family – Mary (his mother), Joseph, his brothers – but only rarely in the Gospels do we hear what his relationship with them was like: when he was twelve years old and causing his parents anxiety for staying behind in the Temple on a family trip to Jerusalem; being at odds publically with his mother when they were guests at a wedding; at the Crucifixion when Jesus commended Mary to the care of his friend and disciple John. We don’t know too much about the love that Jesus had for his family.

But we know a great deal about the love that Jesus had for his disciples. On the last night of his life Jesus gathered with his friends to share a festive seder meal, celebrating the Israelites’ freedom from slavery in Egypt by the goodness and power of God. Jesus took the wine and the bread of the Passover feast and transformed them for all time, to be his Body and Blood, the Real Presence of Christ for his people, the members of his Body. That’s the way we hear it told in Matthew, Mark and Luke; that’s the way that Paul relates the Last Supper to the church in Corinth.

But John tells the story in a different way, from a different angle, and for a different purpose. John tells the story of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet, taking on the role of a servant, a household slave - doing for his friends what Middle Eastern hospitality required; but Jesus as the host of the meal should not have been the one to take up the servant’s towel and bowl of water. Yet, it was exactly what he did.

And washing their feet was an invitation for the disciples to experience Jesus’ love for them more fully, to see a new aspect of love and service, to know that they were being invited to draw closer, to be more connected to Jesus, to share fully with him the same intimate relationship he has with God. John tells us that Jesus, “having loved his own who were in the world…loved them to the end”; Jesus loved the disciples fully, completely, with persistence, with steadfast endurance, to the end. And the picture and action that Jesus offered to the disciples that expressed this love was washing their feet – a gesture of hospitality, and an invitation to deeper relationship.

Jesus went on to say: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” He was commanding them to love beyond their natural circle – beyond their families or friends or sweethearts; to love in ways that include humility and service, as well as affection, kindly regard and warm feelings. And Jesus was not just talking about the Twelve loving only each other, the inner circle; he was talking about loving all those who would be drawn into relationship with Jesus, loving all Christians, loving the Church, loving the community – and, by extension, loving the world.

As Jesus’ followers, as the descendants of the Twelve, we are also loved by Jesus – not just as individuals¸ but as the Church, as the community of faith – and our call is to love one another in the same way Jesus did during his life and work on earth, and in the same way that Jesus loves each one of us now. We are to move beyond our own family circle of loving relationships to embrace with humility and spiritual intimacy all those God calls into our community. And as we do that, as we live our real-life, flesh-and-blood, day-to-day relationships with one another in ways that are rooted and grounded and marked by the deep love of Christ, we will be living symbols and sign-bearers of the name of Jesus. People who are curious about God, and want to know more of Jesus will look at us and the way we love one another, and no that they have seen God at work, a glimpse of divine truth and reality in our midst.

That is, at least, what we are called to do and to be. It is a big job, an impossible task – when seen from a purely human perspective; thank God we are not relying on our own strength and resources, or we would never be able to do it. But we have the love of God in our hearts - given to us at baptism, strengthened every time we receive Christ’s Body and Blood, practiced day-in and day-out in the midst of all the challenges life brings our way.

This love is God’s gift, and the best way we can use and honor this gift is by giving it away – to one another, to the Church, and to the world.  Amen.

Victoria Geer McGrath
All Saints’ Church, Millington, NJ
Maundy Thursday
April 5, 2012